Certainly! I would hope that a young person with a talent for music would become a truly professional musician and composer. Such a person, guided by halacha could show the larger musical community that good music need not be injected with sensual overtones and imagery that glorifies violence, infidelity, promiscuity, and debased human behavior. He could demonstrate and exemplify that music can be used to inspire man’s soul to do good, to feel for other, ect. I would hope that someone with a talent for and natural inclination towards medicine would become a doctor or medical researcher. Guided by halacha, he could use his position as a platform to show his patients, fellow doctors, and the larger medical community how medicine ought to be practiced, recognizing God’s incomprehensible fashioning of the human body and the natural biological and chemical world. The same is true for artists, architects, fashion designers, lawyers, accountants, businessmen, philosophers, mathematicians, engineers, farmers, truck drivers, ect.
We exist not for ourselves, or to satisfy our own desire to learn by sitting in kollel and learning without offering any tangible contribution to our communities and the larger world around us. We exist to be mekadesh shem shamayim, to demonstrate through our adherence to Torah law in every aspect of our multifaceted lives that mankind can and should strive for perfection in every area of human endeavor guided by God’s law. God has given each of us a unique abilioty and disposition so that we may fulfill this task within our own small sphere – whether in the law office, medical practice, college classroom, accounting firm, trading floor, or rav’s office.
We would all do well to perform an honest cheshbon hanefesh, by evaluating our personal abilities, inclinations and character. We would do well to strive to fulfill the particular task that it seems God outfitted us for. How haughty and self-absorbed would we be to discount the way God made us and try to become something we are not, cannot, and should not be. The simple truth is, we are not all suited to be rabbonim, poskim, dayanim, and teachers of Torah. Some are suited to such positions, but most are not. While we must all learn in order to live our lives as God would have us do (lilmod as minas laasos), 90% of us are likely erring dreadfully to believe we must not live our lives in order that we may learn.
I don’t suppose we will ever agree on this. For you, the act of learning Torah is the best thing one can ever do, and it takes precedence over all other obligations. For me, learning is a never-ending journey to discover how God wants us to conduct our earthly lives; we cannot live properly if we do not learn how to do so, but we can also not live properly if all we do is learn how to do so.